The Wisdom of Crowds
Thanks to JDP for the use of this image.
Those of you who have ever tried to raise money for a project will know just how difficult it is to get the ball rolling. This is dakini’s first crowdfunded project and although it’s a lot of fun, it takes hard work, and is such a new approach that no one really knows what you are supposed to do. In search of answers, yesterday Lucky and I went to a lunchtime crowdfunding seminar at City law firm Bates Wells & Braithwaite, at their lovely offices in Canon Street, opposite St Paul’s Cathedral.
Now, despite a life-threatening stiletto addiction, I’m just not the kind of girl you’d describe as polished city slicker. The state of my now unbrushable hair reduces hairdressers to tearful despair, I make inappropriate jokes to fill awkward silences and knock things over at spectacularly embarrassing moments. Until recently I thought that Merrill Lynch made her comeback in Mamma Mia, and a seven-year-old Peruvian child once told me I laugh like a sheep. As such, trips to shiny corporate offices tend to make me rather nervous.
Imagine my surprise (and relief) to turn up at said shiny office to find myself surrounded by authors, documentary filmmakers, short film festival organisers, TV and media types…and only one very likeable lawyer, who was extremely excited about the potential of crowdfunding to boost the creative industries and didn’t frown once at my chipped aquamarine nail varnish. In fact, there was barely an eyebrow raised when I accidentally sent a glass of water flying whilst introducing myself to a Channel 4 exec.
Far from your average dull City law firm, Bates Wells & Braithwaite is the team that helped Franny Armstrong to get the funds together for her excellent film, The Age of Stupid, seen by many people in the industry as the prototype and paradigm of the crowdfunding model. They talked us through the legal issues posed by asking people to invest online as opposed to simply donating, the routes traditionally taken by creative industries and how crowdfunding can create a very different, collective, exciting process.
Michael Norton, the founder of new crowdfunding website Buzzbank, also spoke about how liberating the approach can be for creatives. Often, if you take your project to a large, well-established studio, publishing house (I name no names) or private company, they will try to make you change your work to suit their own agenda before they will help you make it. With crowdfunding, you state exactly what it is you are doing, you invite feedback and input from the people you are reaching out to, but ultimately you stick to your guns. People get involved by chipping in funds because they believe in what you are doing and they want to be part of it. They can see that what you are saying needs to be said, and they are not going to try to pay you to promote anything else. What’s more, having huge numbers of people all saying, this is what we want to say, and we want to make this project happen so much that we’ll even help pay for it, sends a very clear message out to those with the power to make decisions that this is something which really, really matters, and which they would do well to listen to. It’s incredibly democratic, and, according to many, it’s the future.
So, why are we crowdfunding the Tigers campaign? Tigers, as we all know, are in serious danger. They will die out without urgent action. Politicians around the world need to start paying more attention, to focus on what needs to be done to stop this. But politicians have any number of things to worry about and they are not going to bother with any one issue unless they think it really, really matters. The point of the campaign is to prove to them that this does matter – it really matters. That thousands, perhaps even millions, of people love tigers so much that they will work together and chip in their own funds in order to make something which celebrates this beautiful animal and demands its protection, and will ensure that this message is sent out through the global media, to make the others all over the world realise just how urgent and important this is, too.
If we can make this happen, if we can produce something this beautiful, get the front cover featured in major newspapers all over the globe and send the final book to every delegate at the Heads of State Tiger Summit, complete with a list of contributors thousands of names long who cared enough to make the project happen, just imagine the impact that this could have. With enough people behind it, a campaign like this could have an enormous effect on forcing the decision-makers to sit up and take notice of what really, really matters to those they are designated to represent.
dakini x
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